


The Lady is a Bro

by blipblopblork



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Awkwardness, F/M, First Kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2015-07-15
Packaged: 2018-04-09 10:48:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4345631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blipblopblork/pseuds/blipblopblork
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dinesh had always just assumed Carla was a lesbian. Until she made it very very obvious that she wasn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lady is a Bro

Dinesh has no idea how they got here.

One minute, he was sitting around in the living room with the guys debating the merits of dynamic vs static typing, and the next thing he knows it’s two hours later and the room has cleared out and it’s just him and Carla, who’s still trying to convince him that JavaScript isn’t a total clusterfuck of a language, and that not having to worry about defining types is “freeing” or some bullshit like that. And apparently Dinesh wouldn’t know a good thing if it landed in his lap, because suddenly there she is. Carla. Literally straddling his lap, with her face just two inches from his and moving closer, as if she were about to kiss him or something, and all he can think to say is,

“Wait, aren’t you, like, into chicks?”

She pulls back.

“Excuse me?"

Dammit, Dinesh. Way to ruin the moment.

“Nevermind! I take it back! Pretend I didn’t say anything! Clearly you’re not into chicks, or I mean, I guess you could still be into chicks, but not exclusively into chicks, given…” he gestures vaguely at their relative positions. “Can we get back to the part where you were about to make out with me?”

But it’s too late.

“No, I want to know.” she rolls off his lap and flings herself back onto the couch next to him. "What exactly made you think I was a lesbian? Was it the way I dress, or the fact that I’m an engineer?”

“Uh? Both?” he asks meekly. Judging by the look on her face, that was the not the right answer. He tries again.

“God, I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m so used to thinking of you as one of the guys! And I guess, maybe, sometimes I forget that you’re a woman.”

That, apparently, was also the wrong thing to say. Her face sours.

“You forget. That I’m. A woman!?” She’s off the couch now, and she’s angry. “I was so stupid.” she mutters to herself.

“It was a compliment!” he wails after her, but she’s already gone.

\------

The thing is, now that he thinks of her as a woman, he can’t stop thinking about it. How did he not notice that he’d been coding across the table from a woman - a fairly attractive woman, now that he thought about it - every day for three weeks straight?

And there she is now, setting up Jenkins jobs for their new staging environment on AWS, blonde hair tucked up under her hat and fingers flying over the keyboard as she spins up new jobs and tabs back and forth between her browser and her shell, and damn, it is the hottest thing Dinesh has ever seen.

“What are you looking at?” she looks up at him, glaring.

“Nothing! Nothing!” he forces himself to look back to his screen and the automated tests he’s been writing, but it’s nearly impossible with her face, right there, just behind his monitor.

“Did you two bang?” Erlich mumbles from the kitchen around a mouthful of yogurt. “‘Cause if you did, props to you, Dinesh, but it better not have been on my couch. High five, though!” He shoves his spoon in his mouth and raises his empty hand.

Jared looks up from his screen at this. “Dinesh, if you and Carla have entered into relationship of a romantic nature with each other, I have some paperwork that you’ll need to…”

“We didn’t bang!” Dinesh shouts, perhaps a bit too loudly. The rest of the room falls silent and stares at him and Carla.

“Ugh, I’m just going to go code in my room.” he sighs, packing up his laptop to leave.

Erlich pouts around his spoon, right hand still held high. “Hey, don’t leave me hanging here, man!”

\------

Back in his room, Dinesh manages to hammer out a few quick Selenium tests for their new UI before his mind begins to wander again, and he finds himself staring blankly before the blinking cursor on his screen.

He hadn’t meant to offend Carla - he really hadn’t. She was someone he considered a friend - he enjoyed spending time with her, she was a kickass coder, and she felt comfortable enough around him to prank him and fuck with his head.

So it made sense that he'd always thought of her as a bro. They even Broed each other on Bro, like, all the time. Was that weird? He’d never thought it was weird before. But now he was definitely having some very un-bro-like thoughts about her, with her cute button nose, and the vibrant stripes of blue in her hair, and whether she’d let him pull it if they had sex… and yeah, that train of thought got weird fast. But not weird in a bad way. Just definitely not things he should be thinking about a bro.

But if she wasn’t a bro, was she a ho? That didn’t sound right either. She was just, well, Carla. A good friend who he now also happens to very very much want to have sex with.

\---

Things are strained between Dinesh and Carla for the next few days. They manage to work together, more or less amicably, but there’s a palpable tension in the air, and something missing, too. The jokes and banter come less easily - the room is practically quiet, save for the sound of keyboards clacking away. The whole thing feels, well, professional.

It’s fucking weird.

Even Richard finally notices. And he’s usually oblivious as hell.

“Guys? Did Raviga spring another deadline on us and nobody told me? Why is it so quiet in here?” he asks as he enters the room.

“Actually, I think the team is just responding positively to some new agile techniques I’ve introduced.” Jared says brightly. “You see, these are story estimation cards…”

The rest of the team groans.

Well, Dinesh thinks, at least some things around here haven’t changed.

\------

Carla finally corners him out by the pool, where he’s sitting on a lounge chair and idly flicking through Hacker News on his iPhone as he decompresses from a long day.

“Look, we don’t have to be weird about this.” she says as he looks up. “I tried to kiss you, I made things awkward, I get it. I’m sorry.”

He pockets his phone and stands to meet her.

“You’re sorry? I’m the one who called you a lesbian.” Then he backtracks, “not that there’s anything wrong with lesbians! I mean, I love lesbians…” He realizes what he’s just said. "Shit.”

She shakes her head. “Let’s just go back to the way things were, ok?” 

And he know’s it’s like every crappy rom-com cliché ever (Jared made them marathon a few Julia Roberts films last weekend), but he steels himself, takes her hand, looks her in the eye and says “what if I don’t want to go back to the way things were?”

That gets her attention.

“I wanted to kiss you too, you know? I just had this problem where I needed to get my foot out of my mouth first. I’m sorry.”

She laughs a bit at that. "How long did it take you to come up with that line? Or did you google it?"

Dinesh puts on a look of mock offense. "Excuse me! That was 100% a Dinesh original, thank you very much." And then he adds more hesitantly, "So, are we okay?"

Carla nods, and Dinesh almost expects her to turn around and head back into the house. But then she kisses him, chastely at first, and then his hands are in her hair which is even softer than it looked and she tastes so good and it’s perfect and oh - oh, he guesses it’s time for breathing now.

He pulls back. “I think Jared has some paperwork for us.”

She makes a face for a second, before realizing he’s joking.

“Too soon?” He asks.

“Too soon.” She nods in agreement.

But she’s smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> I always kind of hated how I ended this - I felt like Carla forgave Dinesh too easily, and apologized for something that, let's be honest here - was totally Dinesh's fault in the first place. I've tweaked a few lines since I originally published this to make their reconciliation a little less cheesy, but I'm still not in love with the setup for that last scene.
> 
> \------
> 
> Tech Jargon Guide:
> 
> Totally not necessary to enjoy the story, but I figured it can't hurt to explain some of the tech vocabulary I used:
> 
> dynamic vs. static typing - When you create a variable in some programming languages, they force you to declare what "type" it is (ie. is it a number? is it text? etc.) - this is static typing. Others (dynamically typed) just let you create variables and put whatever you want in them. Programmers love to argue about which way is better. Java, Dinesh's favorite language, is statically typed, so I figured it was pretty obvious where he would fall in this debate, so I had Carla argue the other side.
> 
> JavaScript - a programming language. *not* the same thing as Java
> 
> Jenkins jobs - a "continuous integration" tool. Basically, it checks if there are updates to your code and does stuff with the latest copy, such as, say, uploading it to a server.
> 
> staging environment - a server to test your code on before it's ready for primetime ("production").
> 
> AWS - Amazon Web Services. A popular place to host code. (So, basically, what Carla is doing is setting up a tool that will check for code updates and upload them to Amazon for testing. Testing that Dinesh happens to be working on.)
> 
> automated/Selenium tests - Selenium is a tool that you can program to "click" through your website and check whether things work.
> 
> UI - user interface (ie. what the site looks like)
> 
> agile - a set of management philosophies around how to assign and keep track of work. The "scrum board" from the show is an example of an agile tool.
> 
> story estimation cards - another agile tool. Meant to be used with a scrum board. Each row on the board is a "story" or category. Traditionally, the team is supposed to estimate how big a story is by picking a Fibonnacci number (1, 2, 3, 5, 8...) where 8 is a "big story" and 1 is a "tiny story." The numbers are intentionally hand wavy and vague to prevent the team from trying to measure things out in days, since that never works. Story estimation cards are physical cards with these numbers printed on them, so the team can sit around and estimate stories together by all holding up their cards at the same time, like some weird board game. Jared thinks they're the best thing ever.


End file.
